This event is a handful of sand thrown into the lens of the camera. It blinds everything that follows. What is important for us is not the portraiture that Witkin will produce (with its glorious inventory of all the twisted perversions of the human form) but the identity of the decapitated victim. Death has used a person like a dove in a parable. Everything Witkin does will be an attempt to re-create that one instant of wonder when the head found him. Who was it that traveled so long on such a pathway to arrive at this state, mouth still mechanically opening and closing at the photographers feet; the words already gone.